Watchtower on the River Tyne

Charged with leading a fledgling seminary in Gateshead, Rav Mordechai Miller sculpted the Torah landscape. His son and successor Rav Todros Miller recounts his father’s unusual story

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

I

’m not sure what to expect.

Rabbi Todros Miller is in town, visiting Montreal for a family simchah, and he will be speaking.

As a menahel at the Gateshead Seminary, heir to an approach and vision that shaped generations of European Torah Jewry, a path stretching through towns small in size but immense in impact, Rabbi Miller has a reputation as an orator.

But not just an orator. Be careful, I’m told by those who know him; if you get lost in his rhetoric, you will miss what’s really happening.

Because beneath the grandeur of the presentation, there is the unvarnished truth. Beneath the style lies substance.

I take a seat near the rear of the room in which the menahel will be speaking, readying myself to watch him weave a super-philosophical tapestry of Rambans and Maharals before our eyes, leaving us with mouths agape.

The Rav, as his students refer to him, comes in and begins to speak in his elegant British accent, but the material isn’t theology or philosophy. Instead he says a shiur, a classic yeshivish shtickel Torah.

I find it surprising, but only because I lack context. Later, the Rav will sit with me, speaking about the seminary, about his father, about the ideology behind it — and I will understand. The shiur I hear today isn’t a break with the Rav’s day job — it’s the oxygen that allows him to do his day job.

At a table in the empty beis medrash, Rav Todros articulates the vision of his father, Rabbi Mordechai Miller. Unlike others, who often pause to search for the right word, the Rav seems to know exactly what he wants to say, and is able to locate the precise word to convey his point.

“People say that Sarah Schenirer founded Bais Yaakov,” he tells me. “She certainly did, but she wasn’t the pioneer of chinuch habanos. Before Bais Yaakov existed, Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch had a girls’ school, and pre-World War II Telshe had Yavne. What Sarah Schenirer did was create a network, a formal educational system. Within that framework, though, individual schools have their own innovations. To understand the chiddush of Gateshead, you have to know its history.”

Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler’s vision for the young women of Gateshead had a nuance of its own, an ideal slightly different from the one that had guided other Bais Yaakov schools. Gateshead’s Teachers Training College wouldn’t just be an institution designed to keep frum girls connected, but a place where they could absorb a genuine desire for greatness in Torah, to be part of Torah splendor. In 1942, Rav Dessler had established the Gateshead Kollel, where he was cultivating a new generation of talmidei chachamim; he understood that without supportive wives, the soldiers in his army wouldn’t be very effective.

With a roaring fire decimating the Torah world a thousand miles away, Rav Dessler was hard at work rebuilding it.

“It wasn’t just Torah that had been destroyed, but the greatness and glory of Torah as well,” Rav Todros explains. “In order to restore that kavod haTorah, to give Klal Yisrael back its soul, Rav Dessler identified two needs: real talmidei chachamim, and wives who perceived the glory in being married to those scholars.” (Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 730)